In recent years, in a field of system operation and management, a document where the know-how about success cases is accumulated, which is called ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library; registered trademark), has been widely used. The ITIL is published by CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency), which is a British government agency, in 1989 and becomes a de facto international standard in the field of system operation and management at the present time.
For example, as disclosed in Non-Patent Document 1, CMDB (Configuration Management Database) is proposed as a standard to manage pieces of device configuration information in a system. The CMDB is a device configuration information database that is defined in the ITIL.
According to the CMDB, in order to manage the pieces of device configuration information in the system, a device configuration information database is constructed as a database to manage the pieces of device configuration information in the system and a relationship between the pieces of device configuration information. In the device configuration of the system, various components such as a variety of hardware, a software, and a variety of data are included. In this case, how to efficiently and easily configure the device configuration information database has to be considered.
Accordingly, in Patent Document 1, a software configuration managing mechanism that provides a unit for automatically customizing a unit for providing metadata of device configuration information databases to people who register various devices so as to enable easy construction of the device configuration information database and easy change of a device configuration management target is disclosed.
Specifically, a configuration schema registering unit generates a schema of a device configuration information database and metadata for access. A resource configuration information access unit allows a person accessing to the pieces of device configuration information to read, add, update, and delete data of a customized schema type. A configuration information display/maintenance unit collects data from the device configuration information database and integrates metadata as logical resources with the device configuration information database at a higher hierarchy than the metadata.
The device configuration information database at the higher hierarchy, which is called an FCMDB (Federated CMDB), is a database for integrated management of a plurality of pieces of device configuration information. Implementation of a database for each piece of the device configuration information is called an MDR (Management Data Repository).
However, the related art such as “CMDB Federation (CMDBf)”, Committee Draft Version 1.0, [online], Oct. 22, 2007, CMDB Federation Working Group, [searched on Jan. 23, 2008], Internet <URL: http://cmdbf.org/schema/1-0-0/CMDBf%20v1.0.pdf> and Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 09-91122 has the following problems. In integrated management, by the FCMDB, of pieces of device configuration information of respective MDRs in a system, the FCMDB uses a common data model, but the data formats of respective MDRs are not unified. For example, schema may be different, data order may be different even when a common schema is used, or although data that is read from the MDR has a hierarchical structure and a parent-child relationship, the hierarchical structure and the parent-child relationship are not stored in the common data model.
For this reason, the pieces of device configuration information that are read from the MDR may be in different order and the parent-child relationship is not stored in the common data model, and a device that reads the device configuration information from the FCMDB in the format of the MDR cannot express a portion of the pieces of device configuration information included in a schema of the common data model. Therefore, there has been a disadvantage that the pieces of device configuration information that are integrated in the common data model are discrepant with the pieces of device configuration information of respective components before integration.